Women and jihadism: Between the battlefield and the home-front

abstract

This briefing offers preliminary reflections and insights into global jihadi discourses on women’s role as militant activists. It references primary source writings and audiovisual materials produced by jihadi groups and ideologues. The briefing will provide an overview of global jihadi discourses on Muslim women’s role as militant activists, firstly highlighting some of the more important contributions concerning women produced by jihadi ideologues, secondly, examining the place of the Muslim woman in jihadi media, and thirdly, comparing Sunni jihadi discourses on women with transnational Shi'i jihadi discourses. The tensions between the need to recruit women into the frontline and the importance of Muslim women’s traditional role on the home-front create competing discourses. This analysis opens possibilities for further research, and for feminist reflection on the operations of gendered forms of agency in the intersections of militancy and conservative neo-traditional interpretations of Islamic law.

keywords:

• Al-Qa’ida
• jihadism
• militant activism
• Islamic law
• gender agency

Notes

1. Sunni Islamic scholar and theologian who was one of the main ideological proponents of the jihadi against the Soviet Union and the Afghan Communist regime between 1979 and 1989, credited with popularising 'transnational jihad' and the Muslim foreign fighter phenomenon that later led to the formation of groups like Al-Qa'ida, and was an early mentor to Usama bin Laden. He was assassinated in 1989.

2. G Bon, ‘Arrested French women, directed by Islamic State, planned Paris attack’. The New York Times, 9 September 2016, available at: www.nytimes.com, site accessed 22 November 2016.

3. A Rubin & A Breeden, ‘Women's emergence as terrorists in France points to shift in ISIS gender roles’, The New York Times, 1 October 2016, available at: www.nytimes.com, site accessed 15 November 2016.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christopher Anzalone

CHRISTOPHER ANZALONE is a Research Fellow with the International Security Program at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs in the United States and a PhD candidate (ABD) in Islamic and Middle Eastern and African studies at McGill University, Canada. He is on Twitter @ibnsiqilli and blogs at http://ibnalsiqilli.tumblr.com/.